Wasn’t being able to make quick little patches like that immediately available supposed to be one of the benefits of something like Steam?
-Joe
I endorse this post (and the added #5 after it).
I’d be a bit happier if they were just a little bit FASTER. I know they’re smokers (haha!) but jeeze.
-Joe
Yeah but read the following:
Nah, they really need more than speed as noted.
It is just absurdly easy to render the Smoker ineffective. Even if you are far away from a teammate who just got smoked you can shoot him and he is free. The damage the Smoker does is so low and so slow to even begin it is absurd. Even when I have pulled someone all the way to me and pound on them I feel like I am slapping them with a wet noodle. Just silly.
I’m really pretty appalled at the weak matching system. In this day-and-age and coming from Valve and on Steam they should be a lot better than it is.
The ability to demand a certain ping time would be huge.
Skill level (maybe time played or number of matches played) to help with Pub games being better matched.
I’d also like to see it possible to force Random teams on everyone. Get sooo tired of seeing people pop-in and find that all the Infected are taken up and leave. Started a lot of matches short a person due to that.
Also, I’d like to see some measure for people who drop games part way through. This would help people assess and perhaps restrict servers to people who are likely to play rather than drop out. Of course need to be careful about that. I’ve been dropped from a server numerous times with no intent to leave (also been kicked a few times…some people are so touchy :D).
I think point 1 and 2 are good points, but 3 is far more important. Melee needs to be focused away from spamming the key to defeat any size horde. The l4d forums have had tons of discussions on the topic. The best solution I’ve seen has been either a longer cool down between melees, or a stamina bar that prevents you from overusing the melee. Another useful idea would be to nerf the amount of ‘push away’. Limit it to a number of targets per swipe or have those targets less stunned by the attack than currently.
Point 4 seems decent too. Slightly slower reload speed on the shotgun would make the other weapons somewhat more useful and balanced. And I would drop the ammo down to 80-90 range.
Point 5 sounds good to me too. I’ve seen people suggest that the tongue should start doing small amounts of damage immediately, and then do the current omount once he’s stuck or pulled close. Another useful idea for the smoker would be to have the death cloud do a small amount of damage (1-2 dam/sec). This is particularly useful when dealing with closet / corner campers. Though the need for a counter to that make be alleviated if the melee is nerfed.
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I have the following ideas about the tank. I think it needs an overhaul. To understand my first point, you have to understand the way it is now. When a tank is put on fire, he will die in 30-40 seconds depending on difficulty. Shooting him has no affect on this amount of time. You can kill him, but it’s exactly the same as if you had killed him without the fire. Often, the tank will die with several hundred or possible thousands of hit points left. I propose that fire damage be done via a straight damage per second basis. If I put 10 shotgun shells into him, he should die faster than if I just ran away. Equally, if I light him on fire and just run, he should be alive to chase me much further.
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Additionally, I think a tank swipe should be able to hit multiple targets in an arc (25-40 degrees) in front of him. Currently, only the closest target can be hit, even if both people are right on top of each other. It’s visually depicted as a swipe and should be treated as one from an attack perspective.
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Finally, unrelated to the tank, they need to fix up the exploits. Close up a number of the shortcuts and ‘cheese’ people have been using to speed there way past crescendo events. I’m tired of playing games only to get to a point and have 2 or 3 people on my team can try to cheese past it.
Regardless though, the patch is almost done and should be out this week. Nothing we say will change it now. But it is fun to talk about ideas.
It’s amazing to me that VALVe, a developer that should know better, has a seemingly invisible matchmaking system.
The number one thing that kills Versus is the AI Director. It’s nice to be surprised by spawns of things, but when it happens to one side and doesn’t happen at all to the other, that’s a pain in the ass. There’s no way to fix that effectively without giving the team that goes second a huge advantage in knowing where things are.
Nerfing the melee would (potentially) carry over to the Campaign, and the melee is “fine” there. Adjusting the amount of bullets, the rate of reload, effectiveness of the shotgun, and effectiveness of dual pistols (ammo would be an acceptable solution) would do pretty nicely.
I’d like to see the Witch, with the one shot kill if done properly, more fearsome. The Witch means nothing now. Even the Tank, with 4 experienced folks, goes down like nothing. A beefier Tank and Witch would do wonders.
With regards to Infected damage, making it so the common zombies deal a tiny bit more damage would (could) equal out nicely.
I don’t think every one of these things should be done, either. The shotgun should be the slowest reload, the assault rifle should be a medium reload, and the hunting rifle should be the fastest reload.
A pet peeve of mine in this game is when the guns reload. They don’t reload until after the animation finishes and the number actually changes. Change that so the number changes when the animation finishes. Also, if you’re reloading and there are still bullets in the rifle, switching to the pistols shouldn’t mean that you must reload the rifle first when you switch to it. That’s a clunky sentence, so I’ll try to clarify like this: You empty out 15 rounds in your assault rifle, which leaves you at 35. You hit reload, but see a zombie. Before your character actually reloads, you pull the pistols out and kill the zombie. You reload the pistols because some more zombies are coming and switch back to the rifle because you know you have 35 rounds left in the clip. Wrong. You have 0 rounds and have to reload, finish the animation, and wait for the counter to display “50” before you have anything to shoot, despite the fact that you never *actually *reloaded the weapon in the first place.
Eat my wall of text.
Whack A Mole, where’ve you been?
Come to our game tonight if you can.
Seems like a good idea to me. The heroic survivors being slowly overwhelmed is pretty much a standard zombie theme.
-Joe
Valve didn’t make Left 4 Dead. Turtle Rock did.
None of these changes are necessary. Shotgun is fine. Melee is fine. Infected are fine. Smoker is fine. Tank is fine. Witch is fine. Hordes are fine. Reload is fine. Healing is fine. Fire DPS is fine. Hunter slashes are fine.
Ain’t about stopping the survivors. l2p
Warcraft III style match-making would be nice. They just need to fix the major exploits and add content (levels and gimmick weapons).
Wow, wonder if somebody is working for Turtle Rock in here. :rolleyes:
Is this a parody post, or are you really like this?
These things are fine if you are in a game where no one has ever played before. With some experience though the deficits in all that become all too apparent.
And if you are Infected then yeah…it is about stopping the survivors.
Oh, which reminds me…
Anyone else think the scoring system is goofy? While I am not sure how to balance it I find the HUGE bonus allotted to just getting to the safe room to be whacked. Of course there should be a bonus for it but seems to me there should be more value in the play in the field. Often I have had close matches which point wise looked lop sided merely because the other team made it ten feet further (yep…stopped others and have been stopped within feet of the safe room and that completely tilted the score to those who made it).
That would be partially solved if, as I suggested, it became more difficult to survive a map. You’d really felt like you earned those bonus points.
You this wrong. Those things are problems for people who don’t know what they are doing. With experience, you do all of these things, you learn what actually does work against them and then tactics evolve and the problems go away.
People complained (and still do) about survivors stacking on top of each other, such as at the Blood Harvest finale. Now, when we run into this, we clip a hunter into the stack with a pounce and then that hunter slashes all four of them down in no time. It’s pretty easy to do too, once you learn it.
Our tanks no longer die to auto-shotguns because we know better than to rush them. Instead of rushing in, you follow a boomer. The boomer horde causes the survivors to empty their clips and then you can attack them while reloading. Attacking one with the tank and then just one more hunter dramatically increases the lifespan of the tank. That’s our worst case scenario. Nine times out of ten, we just camp an object further up. Camping with auto-shotguns doesn’t work when a car or chair is available.
If you play poorly, you get poor results and things seem broken. Maybe some of them need some minor tweaking, but these sweeping balance changes are completely out of line.
As infected, it isn’t about stopping the survivors. It’s about getting their score as low as possible. If you don’t stop them, you haven’t failed. Not enough people realize this. You can usually identify those who don’t by their insistence on sweeping survivor nerfs and nostalgia for greater difficulty levels. It’s all over the place, unfortunately.
Yeah, the huge bonus points are meant to be a reward for making it to the safe room. To me, that says that making it to the safe room should be a rarity.
Before they fixed it so you can’t change versus mode difficulties, every time I played advanced versus, it was an extreme rarity to make it to the safe room. And there was no complaining about the extreme score differential if someone did, because it was well deserved.
EDIT: This was in response to SenorBeef’s post. I wrote it about an hour ago, and forgot to post it.
I get the impression that if there were a bug that let everyone clip through walls without cheats enabled, you’d say “If people clip through walls, then just clip yourself and go hunt them down within the walls! Clipping is fine. Learn to wall hunt. L2P.”
Yeah, some people would rather play the game in a more natural way that doesn’t rely on trying to exploit the game engine to the max to get optimal results.
“All over the place, unfortunately” - HOW DARE LARGE GROUPS OF PEOPLE DISAGREE WITH ME. HOW COULD SO MANY BE SO WRONG!??
You say this like it’s some universal truth. Something like “people who don’t want the game to play out how it is (or how I like it to play) clearly are simply ignorant and haven’t come to the realization yet that my way is right”.
We have a different gameplay preference. Your high and mighty bullshit over your preferred method of playing (which isn’t appealing to most people by the way… “Oh shit, I just had a pounce that only went for 22 damage, I’m going to commit ritualistic suicide in shame”) is obnoxious. I’m not objectively wrong in my hopes and preferences that the game plays a different way. It’s not as if this game were perfectly conceived in every regard at release - video game perfection which must not be altered.
Do you even have fun when you play video games? You seem to take this stuff ridiculously seriously.
I like Beef’s suggestions. And I say that from the perspective of a survivor, it would be more fun if melee and the autoshotgun were nerfed a bit. It’s supposed to be challenging, or it’s not much fun.
I also agree that for me, it’s more fun if the experience is more like being immersed in a zombie movie, rather than being removed from the storyline and trying to systematically analyzing the game mechanics to maximize my performance. That’s one of the reasons I’m salivating for more maps - I remember the first time I played Death Toll, having only played NM, and all the open space and trees made me shit my pants in fear. That was great. Now that I know the maps really well (well, as much as a spatial relations retard like me can), it detracts from the suspension of disbelief.
So, yeah, what was I trying to say? Making melee weaker - more like it would be in real life - is more fun. Making reloading slower is more fun. Of course there are limits. In real life I would camp the shit out of closets and break down the NM3 door without a second thought. But as I said above, it’s more like wanting it to be like being in a movie. Who wants to watch the heroes studiously avoid contact with zombies, have superpowers of unending strength and stamina and lightning reload abilities, and basically not be in much danger at all? Boring.
Oh, and while I’m all for some kind of ranking system in theory, I doubt it would be workable in fact. And I’d hate to have demerits or something for dropping out midgame. Sometimes I like to play while my baby naps. So I just look for games in progress (feeling that there’s less of a commitment to stick around if I’m replacing someone in the first place), and if I need to go get her, I leave. And it doesn’t bother me when other people have real life stuff that means they have to stop. Now maybe there’s room for marking out griefers and TKers or something, but a general rating system would be pretty tough to keep fair and representative of reality.
Yes and no. You have a point, and that’s to use every pig, even the squeal. Unfortunately, there are some fundamental problems with the game, like the shotgun going through multiple zombies, reloads, and some blatant exploits.
Also, getting the survivor’s score as low as possible means that you’re stopped them. I don’t know what your last paragraph is trying to say.